Surge Pricing For Power On The Way
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Probably the worst kept secret of the year:
Smart meters and other energy appliances such as heat pumps will be equipped with a surge pricing function under plans being put forward by ministers.
The proposals under consultation by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) would require a string of devices to be “smart” by default, allowing them to take advantage of so-called time of use tariffs.
As an example of surge pricing, these tariffs charge households more for electricity when demand is highest and less when it is lower.
Supporters argue they could lead to household savings if appliances or electric cars are programmed to only draw power when prices are low.
However, critics fear they could penalise customers for consuming electricity when they need it most.
The new standards put forward by ministers will also require energy appliances to meet a minimum threshold for cyber security and interoperability, the latter to ensure that all smart meters continue to function correctly after a change of supplier.
In an announcement, the Government said: “Smart appliances enable consumers to manage their energy use to benefit from cheaper tariffs at times of low electricity demand, for example a smart charge point which waits for a period of low demand overnight to charge the car.
“This will reduce the consumer’s bill while also ensuring that their car is ready to be used in the morning.
“By shifting some electricity use away from peak periods, this will ease pressure on the grid and reduce reliance on backup fossil fuel generation and the need for new infrastructure like pylons.”
Forget about the pathetic waffling from the government about reducing bills, reducing fossil fuels and saving on infrastructure. Nobody will be better off.
No, this is an admission of failure. That we can no longer rely on a reliable supply of electricity, and that it will have to be rationed one way or another when supply is tight. And this won’t only be at times of peak demand – there will be many weeks a year when we will be short of power continuously for days on end. Charge your EV? Yes sir, but that will cost you dear!
And be under no illusions. When surge pricing still fails to reduce demand by enough, the sledgehammer will come out, and appliances will be turned off without us having any choice in the matter.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
There will be no ‘household savings.’ The power companies will always get their revenue. Should they give you a break on something, they will perforce raise the price on something else, so that it always balances.
After decades of failed attempts at demand management, we get the announcement from the new boss:
“Real demand management has never been tried by the right people.”
Which they admit but do not highlight. They say it means higher prices at peak times. Thus those with smart EVs get smaller bills, everyone else gets higher bills. Yet obe of the reasons we have demand management is things like EVs increasing demand. So those causing the problem don’t pay the cost.
And the washing machines would load themselves with dirty clothes and detergent ready for the cheap power!
I’m not against ‘time of day’ tariffs where the marginal cost of supply is high. But I abhor compulsion. When and how your use your supply should be yours and yours alone. And it can work! Many years ago in Sydney Australia we forgetfully left our pool pumps running while we went on holiday, The resultant electricity bill was horrendous and it gave our supply company the legal authority to enforce a ‘time of day’ meter on us. Fixed times in those days – Peak, Shoulder, and Low. For some reason my wife took the imposition of this meter as a personal insult and gamed it with great success. Low rate came on at 10pm through to 7am, and at 10.01pm, anything that used more than flea power came on – clothes drier, washing machine, dishwasher, and – best of all, all three heavy consuming pool pumps. Six hours of virtually free electricity gave us the cleanest most sparkling pool in Australia. And thereafter our quarterly bills remained well below their previous levels. It was a lesson both in economics and in the psychology of the offended.
Out of curiosity how long ago was this? As I’m curious to see how cheap electricity from black coal the main fuel for electricity generation in New South Wales would be in a world without subsidised wind and solar as its obvious when you look at brown coal (looking at Victoria) as lignite isn’t really subject to world price due to its limited export.
I think a virtual grid similar to time of use would actually be a good idea as it would expose and end this 100% renewable non-sense your electricity supplier would have to balanced your demand in real time or your supply is disconnected.
When your Christmas roast is half-done and the power is switched off, will you be satisfied? Or, you are half-done shaving and the electric razor stops! What a bright future. 🙂
“Thousands of Colorado residents found themselves locked out of their smart thermostats during sweltering temperatures last week in an effort to prevent power demand from overwhelming the grid.”
“Queensland’s state-owned power grid quietly forced almost 170,000 air-conditioners in homes and businesses into low-power mode six times over summer.”
But the TV adverts said the meters were for the benefit of the users. Surely the government wouldn’t tell porky pies?
I will likely have passed away before the government is caught telling the truth.
I discussed “demand” pricing with E.ON Next many times when they tried to badger me into switching to a “Smart” meter, I told them that this was too allow variable pricing where prices could be switched UP with a mere flick of a switch, they denied this and said it would never happen. Well, no amount of assurances, promises from politicians will prevent this from being the opportunity to allow the Energy industry to let rip with unprecedented surge prices and it will all be in the interest of “saving the planet” and therefore NOT there fault. Ultimately it a sad reflection on the years of wasted effort, insufficient nuclear capacity to provide reliable, low cost Energy, blackouts lasting weeks are our future, with desperate people installing diesel generators to give them some desperately needed Third World shanty town power- what a shit show.
All so predictable (and predicted). We must have had at least 20 ministers responsible for energy since 1997, and not a single one of them has seen blackouts coming as the direct result of their policies (or they deliberately planned it this way).
I think the Government is only making oinky noises; they assume demand is going to soar and soar, in the enjoyable rush to Net Zero, and a little extra management of demand will ultimately be necessary (and sufficient!). But, as usual, they have absolutely no idea what they are doing. It all reminds me of when I complained, fifty years ago, in an old French hotel that the lights were flickering. After a few minutes, I heard some peculiar noises. The manager was out in the corridor with a hatch open. He was probing with a screwdriver and judging from the shocks he received what the problem might be!
How OUR nightmare will play out, I have no idea.
There is a reason peak demand exists people have to go to and come from work on a daily basis. Christmas day is the probably the only day of the year when the pattern of the demand curve changes. Combined with other factors in the net zero rush over the cliff, this will hammer working parents families with children. Think about it, the only time in the day when families are together is breakfast and supper. At breakfast they need energy to get ready for the day ahead, then when they get home they need to be eat, wash clothes, heat the house & water and get prepared for the next day before going to sleep. Do you want a quiet nights sleep or have the machines making noise at night. This really is more punishment for working stiffs, they cannot avoid the surge pricing, there is only a narrow window in the morning and evening when they must use energy.
Surely, if everyone can’t charge their EV until 2AM that will create a surge in demand at……….
In an announcement, the Government said: “Smart appliances enable consumers to manage their energy use to benefit from cheaper tariffs at times of low electricity demand, for example a smart charge point which waits for a period of low demand overnight to charge the car.
So if there isn’t a period of low enough demand, you’ll wake up to a car with a flat battery. Great!
Yes, if there’s a lull in the wind and a back-up generator goes down, no EV chargers start so EV owners all wake up to no charge.
As you might if your battery car is considered to be part of the grid and used as back up.
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It is not going to work, Reliable affordable gas/electricity is essential to life.
So all the EVs with until prices drop before turning on their chargers, then all turn on their chargers at the same time…
At which point, prices rise. And they turn off? So prices fall? So they turn on?
Sounds a plan!
Does this mean that the £13.5B wasted so far on smart meters has to be written off? We who don’t have one yet shouldn’t worry too much. The new meters will be years late in being introduced even if they work,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/03/26/TELEMMGLPICT000371845430_17114735467240_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=1280&imdensity=2
There’s such rubbish on the “news” programmes at breakfast time that I sometimes turn to Al-Jazeera for a spot of real (if a bit biased) news. Whilst Swiss grannies are staying indoors in hot weather, a famine is raging through Sudan – not because of climate change but due to the usual conflicts. Haven’t the UN and WHO got better things to do? Just what are we paying for (and how much?)?
Haven’t the UN and WHO got better things to do?
There was a time when the UN would prioritise creating and maintaining peace between warring “peoples” e.g. Korea and Cyprus. That prioritisation appears to have diminished, although I’m sure it’s politically complex.
See also Ross Clark in Spectator.
Meanwhile Arctic ice extent is horribly normal.
The ice is non-compliant. It will be cancelled (ignored).
Heat pumps, net zero, 15 minute cities and more. Are all part of the Globalist plan to destroy our freedom and create a captive population. Heat pumps only work in heavily insulated properties with double sized radiators. Even then the maximum temperature they can attain is 65f. In order to get above 65 extra electricity is required. Which isn’t in the grid , because they destroyed coal fired furnaces , to play the net zero game. Renewables by definition cannot EVER supply all our energy needs. So we have a government determined to go net zero, promote EV.s and tax anyone on a digital tariff to death. Next is digital currency and curtailment of freedom of speech. We have one chance, just one…the next election, or whoever gets in Labour/ conservative will imprison us all !
So it is all going to plan (their)
I don’t know what we’re all worrying about:
Clean energy myths: is it really too expensive and not reliable? | The Great Grid Upgrade | The Guardian
😂
It will be chaos because renewables are chaotically intermittent and whilst there may be demand peaks, although these may change with ev charging overnight, there is no knowing when electricity will be abundant or in short supply and for how long. So unforeseen rolling blackouts will be required to ensure demand matches supply and prevent total grid collapse.
There is no plan, even by 2050 for any electricity storage.
Those lucky enough will be able to run generators although I expect they will be banned.
The result will be chaos, impoverishment, social disharmony and a massive increase in criminality, all deliberately planned features of the Net Zero Strategy.
The UK already has high electricity prices when compared with most of Western Europe. As previously posted by another contributor:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/
Depending on your view this is either total system failure or total success.
either total system failure or total success.
In ye olden days, the CEGB would have regarded the lack of sufficient capacity to meet demand as a failure.
As I recall (but I am prepared to be corrected!), there was one instance during the winter of 1963 where the CEGB couldn’t meet demand; this failure resulted in the subsequent construction of thermal power stations.
Yes I believe amazingly there was only 1 major incident where CEGB couldn’t meet demand (if we excluding the rolling blackouts due to industrial action by power station workers that winter) and its wasn’t a lack of sufficient generating capacity per say but Southern England becoming islanded as the post war electricity strategy could be summarised as coal by wire where large coal power station were built near to large coal mines largely in the Midland and North and the power sent by the high voltage transmission system to Southern England.
Yes I think the TPTB realised how screwed Southern England would have been if it couldn’t get the high voltage transmission system back online as quickly as they did and the 1963 winter was just before natural gas was discovered in the North sea so it was expected electric space heating would become the dominate form of space heating in the UK. Which in part was the reason we ended up with large oil fired powers station like Fawley (2GW), Grain (4GW), Littlebrook D (2GW) etc. and I suspect this was also one of the factors in why the next phase of Britain’s nuclear power program was accelerated leading the ARG sage as like with the Magnox the intention was to build nuclear capacity in places without much coal e.g. South Western England Hinkley point, Oldbury and Berkeley. As it is clear Bradwell & Sizewell were intended to be expanded like Dungeness was it is clear Hartlepool was selected for political reasons. The real problem is the UK has not had a competent energy policy for the last 60 years excluding the choice to replace coal gas with natural gas.
Where is the accountability? We have the AGR mess and some predictably fiasco like dash for gas when it was know using our Natural gas resource in that way would make the UK a net importer of natural gas within a decade at a time when it was conceivable in the pre fracking boom day the United States would become a large importer of LNG.
Gamecock is a retired computer scientist. Yet he has no clue how this is to work. Or even what it would look like. It sounds like programming your heat pump to monitor current electricity pricing and decide whether to run or not. It will have pricing data.
One would think “smart” would have to be built in. How much is that going to add to the price. And, as above, how much data is going to be available to your washing machine so it can decide what to do?
The alleged objective is to reduce demand. The homeowner – or his toilet – will have to know current pricing to make decisions. How damn smart do the politicians think these devices are going to be? How are they going to get data? Who is going to program them?
How damn smart do the politicians think these devices are going to be?
Perhaps hand over control to the energy supplier or directly to our glorious leaders?
Of course! [Gamecock didn’t think evil enough.]
Y’all are going to need bigger routers.
So, you have to register all your “devices” (washing machine . . . light bulbs? (will light bulbs have Intel chips?)) with the government. They have to know what you have so they can control it.
You might be able to logon to some government system and input your preferences . . . which, being government, will be ignored.
Government will gather usage data on all your devices. Net Zero is too important for you to have privacy.
When Labour is in, they will cut off your TV if they catch you watching a Tory campaign ad.
They will know when you washed a load of clothes. The night shift will cut off your dryer, just for grins.
Gamecock didn’t think dystopian enough.
Peak period will be night time in Autumn/Winter when people’s heat pumps are working overtime, everyone is charging their cars and people with solar panels will be drawing current from the grid.
So… heat pumps will switch off when most needed, BEVs will not be charged ready for the next morning.
It’s good to see a plan come together.
What’s more, if surge pricing fails to keep electricity demand within what can be generated, smart meters will be used to turn off electricity to selected users who are deemed by electricity companies to be using “too much” electricity.
I think this was always the aim behind the push for us all to get smart meters